Project planning is one of the 8 essential Project Management Steps ever Project Manager must follow. Project planning is very important since the foundation and backbone of the project will depend on the planning stage. As a project manager you would need to use management-level planning to map out an overview of resources, acquisitions, subcontracts and costs. Scheduling the project and and managing timelines plays an important role in the planning and execution of the project as the cost of the project is depending on the execution time. Good Project Planning and Scheduling tools let you plan efficiently and effectively deploy the organization’s resources when they are needed.

In this post we review free open source Project Management software that let you plan, schedule and efficiently manage your project cost.

1. Endeavour Software Project Management

Endeavour Software Project Management is an Open Source solution to manage the creation of large-scale enterprise systems in an iterative and incremental development process. It features support for Use Case management, Iterations, Project Plan, Change Requests, Defect Tracking, Test Cases, Test Plans, Tasks, Document management, Reports and many other process artifacts. Endeavour Software Project Management has been designed for easy to use, intuitive. It is realistic by avoiding unnecessary features that might increase complexity. As part of the project management it let you manage your resource and plan the project efficiently.

Feng Office community version is an open source project management software that allows businesses to manage project tasks, billing, documents, communication with co-workers, customers and vendors, schedule meetings and events, and share every kind of electronic information. It was earlier known as OpenGoo. It supports web based access so an be accessed from anywhere.

GanttProject is a open source cross-platform desktop tool for project scheduling and management. It runs on Windows, Linux and MacOSX. With GanttProject you can create work breakdown structure, draw dependencies, define milestones. It lets you assign human resources to work on tasks, see their allocation on the Resource Load chart. You can also generate PERT chart from Gantt chart.

Open Workbench is an open source desktop application that provides robust project scheduling and management functionality. It is the scheduling standard for more than 100,000 project managers worldwide, Open Workbench is a free and powerful alternative to Microsoft Project. You can define projects and create associated work breakdown structures with activities, phases, tasks and milestones.

OpenProj is a free, open source desktop alternative to Microsoft Project. The OpenProj solution is ideal for desktop project management and is available on Linux, Unix, Mac or Windows. OpenProj is a complete desktop replacement of Microsoft Project and even opens existing native Project files. OpenProj shares the most advanced scheduling engine in the industry with Projects On Demand. The OpenProj solution has Gantt Charts, Network Diagrams (PERT Charts), WBS and RBS charts, Earned Value costing and more.

Project.net is an open source, enterprise scale project management application that maximizes the performance of any organization tracking a single project or a portfolio of projects. Project.net addresses the needs of all project and corporate stakeholders – team members, project managers, portfolio managers, and executives – for current and accurate information on the status of all projects. Project.net delivers the real-time reporting that keeps distributed projects on track.

Project-Open is one of the leading open source project management tools. It is a comprehensive resource management tool that is fully integrated into the ERP system. It lets you Plan projects and resources via GanttProject, Track project advance and resource consumption of both internal and external costs and execute status reporting using “traffic lights.

TaskJuggler is a modern and powerful, Free and Open Source Software project management tool. Its new approach to project planning and tracking is more flexible and superior to the commonly used Gantt chart editing tools. It has already been successfully used in many projects and scales easily to projects with hundreds of resources and thousands of tasks. TaskJuggler is project management software for serious project managers. It covers the complete spectrum of project management tasks from the first idea to the completion of the project. It assists you during project scoping, resource assignment, cost and revenue planning, risk and communication management.

I’d like to suggest one more open-source solution to the entire list – TeamLab. It’s an enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform which covers features for social networking, project management & instant messaging.

2-plan Team is a web-based project management tool that, just like its desktop counterpart (2-plan), addresses the typical problems that are faced by the users of various web-based project management tools. Moreover, 2-plan Team is seamlessly integrated with the desktop version (2-plan) in order to give the best and the most flexible combination of desktop and web-based PM tools that communicate with each other perfectly. And the best part is that it is open source…so you don’t need to pay a penny to get/ use it.

We’d love to see you review Dooster. The reviews we’re seeing from our users are very positive. We have users both large and small, personal and business, from a wide variety of industries using Dooster for their project management needs.